3 Ways to Get Started with AI in Your B2B Marketing

It's never been more important for B2B marketers to adopt artificial intelligence.

That's because B2B buyers have changed. They look more like consumers and increasingly self-direct their own buying processes. 

And the only way to keep up—despite the proliferation of new technologies and tactics—is to hyper-personalize the buyer journey using AI.

Easier said than done. 

Often, B2B marketers have heard of artificial intelligence and smarter technologies, but don’t know how to actually get started.

Why not take the advice of an expert on the subject?

Nick Edouard is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at PathFactory, an AI-powered content recommendation platform designed for use by B2B marketers. So, you could say he knows a thing or two about actually applying AI to your B2B marketing.

Here are three pieces of advice he has about B2B AI adoption, taken from our conversation with him in a recent Marketing AI Institute webinar (see below).

1. You’re going to need buyer behavior data.

Artificial intelligence runs on data, so you’re going to need it if you want to get value out of AI. 

Edouard recommends starting out with three types of data: visitor attributes, content attributes (or metadata), and engagement data. This should give you a foundational picture of how visitors engage with content and products/services on your site.

Once you have that data, you’ll want to start marrying it to success data, or data from your CRM system, so you can paint a picture of how engagement impacts revenue and conversion rates.

2. Start looking into recommenders.

Once you have your data squared away, you’ll want to begin looking into a broad class of AI called recommenders or recommendation engines. These are AI systems that use buyer behavior data to surface the right content or products/services for the right people at the right time. 

PathFactory uses a recommendation engine to surface the most relevant content for B2B buyers. Amazon uses one to show you related products you might be interested in. And Netflix does the same for movies and shows.

Recommenders come in lots of shapes and sizes, but they’re a great avenue to start researching if you’re a B2B marketer. Chances are, your business could see real impact from offering personalized recommendations to buyers while they’re consuming your content or visiting your site.

3. Pay close attention to how UI works with AI.

As you explore recommenders, pay very close attention to how AI systems impact user interface (UI), says Edouard. Today’s B2B buying journey is largely self-directed, so any experience with content or products/services must be clear, clean, and easy to navigate.

Most of all, your entire website UI must make it simple for buyers to find whatever it is they need. What someone needs entirely depends on the buyer and their individual preferences. Understanding these preferences and serving the perfect personalized experience isn’t possible for human marketers to do in real time and at scale. 

That’s what makes artificial intelligence so important if you want to create a powerful, effective, and profitable B2B buying experience.

Want to learn even more from experts like Nick?

Check out the webinar below.

Learn How to Apply AI—Straight from the Experts

Below, you can access Nick’s full webinar on how to get started with AI in your B2B marketing.

In it, Nick talks with Paul Roetzer, Marketing AI Institute founder, about how to use AI to hyper-personalize your B2B marketing at scale.

In the webinar, you'll learn how to:

• Understand the fundamental shift B2B buyers have undergone in the past few years.
• Leverage buyer enablement to make the most of self-directed consumer buying journeys. 
• Use AI to achieve hyper-personalized, one-to-one marketing at scale.

Click below to get free instant access.